Asian Art Museum program draws on real-world issues

Artist Ryan Tacata points out the lack of historical import given to work created out of minority perspectives.

Artist Ryan Tacata points out the lack of historical import given...

For four years, the Artists Drawing Club at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum provided a space for Asian American artists to create new projects — whatever they wanted to do would be just fine.

But the fifth year of the program is different. Why? Because the nation is different. This year, the club has taken a more pointed approach, reflecting apprehensions amid a tenuous national atmosphere, while still altogether remaining loose.

“How I articulated the theme had to be open-ended,” says Marc Mayer, the program curator and the museum’s senior educator for contemporary art. “It was almost like, ‘Considering everything that’s happened, things are pretty raw. There’s a lot for us to digest, and I’m sure many things that each of us is anxious about. What would it look like to bring that into your work in this project?’”

The directions the projects take are unfixed; at the drawing club, invited artists are not beholden to any particular guideline or form in conceiving their work.

Shiva Ahmadi’s project is based on the story of a 3-year-old refugee whose body was photographed on a Greek shore.

Shiva Ahmadi’s project is based on the story of a 3-year-old refugee whose body was photographed on a Greek shore.

Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle

Asian Art Museum program draws on real-world issues

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In 2015, dancer Bobbi Jene Smith performed around artist Sanaz Mazinani’s installation of kaleidoscopic glass pieces whose mirrored surfaces reflected a video screen of Hollywood explosion footage — a meditation on war, mass media and entertainment. The year before, artistic pair Hughen and Starkweather played with notions of memory and perception in “Re:depiction” by enacting a scavenger hunt of sorts. Visitors were invited to find artifacts throughout the museum using audio interviews and displays of the artists’ imitative sketches, which were drawn solely by listening to museum staff’s descriptions of the objects.

Nevertheless, this year’s stage is an opportunity to grapple with more topical, intensified questions. The first drawing club event in April, titled “Who Do You Trust?,” incorporated interactive modern dance, along with video of at times startlingly vulnerable interviews dealing with the concept of trust.

“It was really poignant and also spoke to many anxieties I think many of us might be feeling about travel or about political conversations or the state of the world,” Mayer says. “How do we know that people have our best interests at heart? It’s this kind of a leap of faith.”

In the second installment on Thursday, May 25, Jeremy Keith Villaluz’s “Respond, React!” presents a simple, two-part evening encouraging dialogue and connection in a time of aggressive partisanship.

A panel of four (Villaluz and three academics) will be in conversation on the intersection of art, politics and education. Beforehand, visitors will take part in an ongoing mail-art project Villaluz has been conducting, asking participants to use a postcard — whose front side contains Villaluz’s black-and-white photograph of an uncle embracing his young son — to reach out to anybody with a message of gratitude, affirmation or perhaps reconciliation.

Photo: Noah Berger, Special To The Chronicle

Jeremy Keith Villaluz is the Artists Drawing Club’s featured artist on Thursday, May 25.

Jeremy Keith Villaluz is the Artists Drawing Club’s featured...

“As big as conversation needs to happen, what also needs to happen in regards to conversation is listening and trust and healing,” Villaluz says. “I think right now conversation isn’t happening, and it’s not because people aren’t talking — like, I think everybody’s just kind of waiting for their turn to talk. And it’s constantly that.”

Part of the project is in reaction to the paradox of social media following the election — a tool ostensibly for connectivity has instead become a soapbox for divisive rhetoric and encouraged empty, distancing forms of gratification.

It can be just as much of a political statement, Villaluz says, to reach out to someone close on the other side of the aisle “to say … ‘I still love you. You still love me. Remember when you cooked me breakfast yesterday? Thank you.’”

Still, the drawing club is not altogether a political rap session, even if the work featured does touch on the political.

Iranian American artist and painter Shiva Ahmadi’s drawing club project (Aug. 24) will feature “Ascend,” an animation created in collaboration with animator Sharad Kant Patel and based on the story of Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian refugee whose lifeless body was photographed on a Greek shore after his family’s escaping boat capsized. The work itself (to be featured separately at the museum in November) is inherently tied to global ideological queries, but her evening with the drawing club focuses instead on a detailed breakdown with visitors of the technical creation of the art — an opportunity to show the making-of process rarely afforded to both artists and audiences.

In this vein, the drawing club both enables a rare spotlight for Asian American or Middle Eastern artists, while also creating a closer relationship between community and its interaction with art. In “Who Do You Trust?,” some audience members were led along in movement by dancers, a visceral demonstration of faith. The night was emotional, Mayer says, even spiritual.

Mayer specifically conceived the drawing club amid a revamping for the Asian Art Museum, which had previously lacked a platform for contemporary or living Asian artists.

Villaluz and artist Ryan Tacata (whose drawing club project, “Lola,” takes place on July 20) each refer to the glaring lack of historical import given to work created out of minority perspectives such as Filipino art. What does it mean, Villaluz says, if such stories and experiences are now not simply ignored, but in the current sociopolitical moment, even villainized?

The drawing club’s existence, even in just a handful of Thursday nights, can be a small but meaningful effort to rectify this oversight and empower both artists and community under the weight of erasure.

“It’s one thing to create art, but it’s another to not have a space to have it shared publicly, for it to be engaged in public discourse,” Tacata says. “By creating and carving out that space, it’s saying, ‘Your narrative matters. Your narrative is actually deeply important.’”